more to have enough money to catch the six o’clock (or four-thirty or two-fifteen or whatever) Greyhound leaving from the Port Authority Bus Terminal for upstate. It was vital that they get to the Albany hospital ICU as soon as possible to see their dad for maybe the last time before he went into the probably-fatal brain operation. Carrie, always the more dramatic of the two, volunteered to be the one to start out doing the pitch. Connie would back her up with nods and whimpers. When they both got good at presenting the hustle, they’d switch off.
The twins loved it. The only adjustment I had to make was allowing them to use their rollerblades instead of walking.
We spent three hours that night, between chasing kittens, flattening out the details. I pre-asking all the questions I could think of that the tourists might have. We rehearsed everything. Carrie wanted to use the name Dorothy and take one of the kittens along and call it Toto. Connie and I vetoed the idea. Her tendency was to overdramatize. By the third dry run she’d already taught herself a way to sob and tear-up every time she or Connie used the word ‘aneurism.’
The next morning at eleven o’clock, check-out time at the mid-town Manhattan hotels, the girls began skating around Times Square going up to anyone who appeared to be a mooch or an out-of-towner with luggage.
It was a strong scam. Sometimes the kids raked in as much as two hundred a day. Twenties and tens. The tourists and the mid-town shirt-and-tie crowd were unable to say no to twins in pigtails.
Chapter Twenty-eight
WE HAD BEEN through The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz three or four times. I’d tried to introduce other stuff, some Brontë, Margaret Mitchell, even some creepy Ann Rice but they would have none of it. Oz was too powerful. And, of course, the kittens were living proof of the existence of Munchkins.
Most days, in the afternoons, after their Times Square hustle, because of the sopping heat, we’d walk cross-town to our rooming house on Fifty-first Street, pick up the cardboard TV crate with the holes in it where they housed their kittens, mount the box on a supermarket shopping cart, then roll up Eighth Avenue to Central Park. I’d count the day’s cash while the girls played with the kittens and had a contest to see who could eat the most Eskimo Pies and Orange Sherbet push-ups. They’d made a rule for me. It was based on an incident I’d had with an asshole clerk at the video arcade. I’d argued and gotten punched and inadvertently misplaced a hundred dollars in cash. The rule was: no wine drinking in public.
We met Elizabeth in Central Park. She was pushing a stroller along the walkway. The twins ogled anything that was a baby, anything in a diaper, so meeting her was as unavoidable as breathing smog.
Her job was being the full-time nanny to a baby named Sven, the eighteen-month-old son of a European magazine CEO guy who lived in the Essex House on Central Park South for four months out of every year. Sven had a seven-year-old brother named Erik. He had a spinal disease and stayed at home at the apartment most of the time with his mother while Elizabeth spent the afternoons wheeling baby Sven around in the park.
Elizabeth was Cuban. From a town outside Havana. She was smart and spoke decent American. Twenty years old and she had already had three children of her own that she’d left with her mother back on the island. Elizabeth was a bit overweight and she had sad eyes but the twins, who were always good at deciding such matters, liked her right away. And Elizabeth’s smile was like a beam from Venus.
It turned out that she loved whiskey too.
After the first day or two, the two of us sat on a long bench, laughing and sipping Ten-High out of Coca-Cola cups while Carrie and Connie played with Sven and the kittens on the grass.
By the end of the week I’d asked Elizabeth in her white nanny uniform with the white panty hose and two-tone oxford shoes if she’d like to take an hour off and go for a short cab ride with me back to my rooming house to look at a poem I was writing honoring Carmen Miranda and Fidel Castro. It made her laugh. She took a big hit from her Coca-Cola cup and then smiled her remarkable smile.
We left Sven